Ferrante, Elena, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Book 3, The Neapolitan Novels

The New York Times - Amy Rowland

Nothing you read about Elena Ferrante's work prepares you for the ferocity of it. And with each new novel in her revelatory Neapolitan series, she unprepares you all over again…Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the story of a furious friendship, and the internal violence suffered by two women set against the turbulent landscape of a fractured Italy…this is a woman's story told with such truthfulness that it is not so much a life observed as it is felt. The reader is ransacked and steps back into the world gingerly, with lingering questions about estrangement and belonging.